The INTERNET Database of Periodic Tables

There are hundreds of periodic tables in web space, but there is only one comprehensive database of periodic tables & periodic system formulations. If you know of an interesting periodic table that is missing, please contact the database curator: Dr Mark R Leach.

The Greek Classical Elements — Earth, Water, Air, Fire and Aether — date from 450 BC or so, and persisted throughout the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, deeply influencing European thought and culture.

Plato characterizes the elements from a list created by the Sicilian philosopher Empedocles called these the four "roots." Plato seems to have been the first to use the term element:

Antoine
Lavoisier's produced the first modern list of chemical elements, containing among others, the 23 elements of those known then. He also redefined the term "element". Previously the metals, except mercury, were not considered elements. Wikipedia

Note the huge errors in the atomic weights, compared with modern values.

This was because while Dalton had deduced that atoms combine in fixed (stoichiometric) ratios in compounds, he not know what the ratios were. Thus there were two unknowns: the atomic weights (masses) and the stoichiometric ratios.

The Museum of the History of Science, Oxford, has a display of Charles Daubeny's teaching materials from 1831, including a black painted wooden board with "SYMBOLS OF SIMPLE BODIES": symbols, atomic weights and names of elements in two columns, and a small pile of cubes with element symbol.

Note that some of the numbers seem very strange to our eyes: carbon is given as 6 (rather than 12) and oxygen 8 (not 16), while others correspond with modern values remarkably well, chlorine is given as 36 rather than 35.5.

Daubeny's weights (along with the modern mass) are given:

Daubeny's SYMBOLS OF SIMPLE BODIES (1831)

O

8

(16.0)

Oxygen

K

40

(39.1)

Potassium

Cl

36

(35.5)

Chlorine

Na

24

(23.0)

Sodium

Fl

19

(19.0)

Fluorine

Ca

20

(40.1)

Calcium

B

80

(79.9)

Bromine

Mg

12

(24.3)

Magnesium

I

124

(127)

Iodine

Si

8

(28.1)

Silicon

H

1

(1.01)

Hydrogen

Al

10

(27.0)

Aluminium

N

14

(14.0)

Nitrogen

Fe

28

(55.8)

Iron

C

6

(12.0)

Carbon

Cu

64

(63.5)

Copper

S

16

(32.1)

Sulphur

Pb

104

(207)

Lead

P

16

(31.0)

Phosphorus

Hg

200

(200.6)

Mercury

Check out the virtual tour of the museum, here. The display of Daubeny's teaching materials can be found in the basement, here.

The most electronegative element (oxygen or Sauerstoff) is listed at the top left and the least electronegative (potassium or Kalium) lower right. The line between hydrogen (Wasserstoff) and gold seperates the predomently electronegative elements from the electropositive elements. Page 17 and ref. 32 from Bill Jensen's Electronegativity from Avogadro to Pauling Part I: Origins of the Electronegativity Concept, J. Chem. Educ., 73, 11-20 (1996):

Johann Dobereiner (1780 - 1849) found 'triads', a sequence
of three similar elements, where the middle element has a mass equal to
the average of the least and most massive. A brief biography can be found on the Nature website.

The diagram below, updated
from here,
uses mid-nineteenth century atomic mass information rather than modern
data. If atomic numbers (Z) are used (a property unknown in 1850), the
triads are exact:

The French geologist , Alexandre-Émile
Béguyer de Chancourtois was the first person to make
use of atomic weights to produce a classification of periodicity. He drew
the elements as a continuous spiral around a metal cylinder divided into
16 parts. The atomic weight of oxygen was taken as 16 and was used as
the standard against which all the other elements were compared. Tellurium
was situated at the centre, prompting vis tellurique, or telluric
screw.

Chancourtois' original formulation
includes elements in their correct places, selected compounds and some
elements in more than one place. The helix was an important advance in
that it introduced the concept of periodicity, but it was flawed. The
formulation was rediscovered in the 1889 (P. J. Hartog, "A First Foreshadowing
of the Periodic Law" Nature 41, 186-8 (1889)), and since then it has appeared
most often in a simplified form that emphasizes the virtues and eliminates
its flaws. [Thanks to CG
for this info.]

In his book, The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Scerri writes how Lothar Meyer devised a partial periodic tables consisting of 28 elements arranged in order of increasing atomic weight in which the elements were grouped into vertical columns according to their chemical valences:

One of the first attempts at
a periodic table, known as "Newlands octaves", arranged the
known elements by atomic weight. Newland noticed that if he broke up his
list of elements into groups of seven  starting a new row with the
eighth element  the first element in each of those groups had similar
chemistry. More here.

H

F

Cl

Co & Ni

Br

Pd

I

Pt & Ir

Li

Na

K

Cu

Rb

Ag

Cs

Os

G

Mg

Ca

Zn

Sr

Cd

Ba & V

Hg

Bo

Al

Cr

Y

Ce & La

U

Ta

Tl

C

Si

Ti

In

Zr

Sn

W

Pb

N

P

Mn

As

Di & Mo

Sb

Nb

Bi

O

S

Fe

Se

Ro & Ru

Te

Au

Th

Seeing the word
octave applied to this table may lead one to think that Newlands recognised
periods of eight elements with repeating properties, as we do with the
modern periodic table, for example: Li Be B C N O F Ne.

However, each sequence
of Newlands' octaves contain only seven elements. Count the columns!
In Newlands' day the group 8 (18) rare gas elements, He, Ne, Ar, Kr
& Xe, had not yet been discovered.

To Newlands, Li
to Na is an octave of eight elements, the eighth element repeating the
properties of the first:

A B C D E F G A

To Newlands, Li
to Na is an octave of eight elements.

We say Li to Ne
is a period of eight elements, and that that Li and Na are in different
periods. Indeed, the Li to Na series consists of nine elements.

In Newlands' day the group 8 (18) rare gas elements, He, Ne,
Ar, Kr & Xe, had not been discovered.

Read more
about Newland's Octaves, including a commentry on the origional
papers in Carmen Giunta's Elements and Atoms: Case Studies in the
Development of Chemistry.

In his book, The Periodic Table: A Very Short Introduction, Eric Scerri writes how Lothar Meyer produced an expanded periodic system for his1868 textbook which contained 53 elements. Unfortunately, the table was misplaced by the publisher and was not appear until after his death in 1895:

Baker's electronegativity table of 1870 differs from Berzelius' listing of 1836 only by the addition of the newly discovered elements. Page 280 and ref. 5 from Bill Jensen's: Electronegativity from Avogadro to Pauling Part II: Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Developments, J. Chem. Educ., 80, 279-287 (2003):

In large part, the success of the Mendeleev's
analysis can be attributed to the gaps which he predicted
would contain undiscovered elements with predictable properties. Mendeleev
named these unknown elements using the terms eka, dvi & tri
(1, 2 & 3 from the ancient Indian language of Sanskrit).